


Autumn in Prydain

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [30]
Category: Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander
Genre: 30Fic, F/M, Illness, Injury, Kid Fic, Mortality, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 13:26:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13101111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: There's a chill in the air when they bring Taran home.(Standalone story, see note for series explanation.)





	Autumn in Prydain

**Author's Note:**

> My Thirty Fic series was a project of writing stories about characters turning or being thirty. The stories aren't related except by that one common thread.

There's a chill in the air when they bring Taran home. Eilonwy is tying bundles of herbs for drying when the girls come running in.

"The warriors are back, Mam! But Tad isn't with them!"

Eilonwy hands the bundle in her hands to one of her women - a queen is never alone - and goes running down through the castle, out to the courtyard. The war band has Taran's banner, but she doesn't see Taran. Then she realizes there's a makeshift litter slung between two of the horses. Taran's war-leader catches her before she can run to it.

"He's alive," the man says. "But, my queen... you must be brave."

"I will see for myself," Eilonwy says, pulling her hand away sharply. She stalks to the litter.

Taran is pale, wrapped in his cloak, sweat upon his brow. His eyes are closed, and when she puts her hand to his forehead, he only moans faintly.

"Take him to his bed," Eilonwy orders. "Build up the fire. Send someone out to find my son."

"Is Tad going to be alright?" a little voice asks behind her. The girls have followed her down, and little Fflur looks ready to cry.

"Nothing is certain until it's done," Eilonwy says, trying to sound confident. "Go with your sister now. Help mind the baby. I'll send for you soon as I know anything."

*

Taran has an arrow-wound to the thigh, and a fever. The wound has been treated, but not well; Eilonwy goes about cleaning and re-dressing it.

"They should have taken you to the nearest cantrev," she mutters, taking clean cloths from one of her women. "I can't imagine why they dragged you all the way back here."

"The King insisted," someone says behind her, clearing his throat. One of Taran's warriors, standing there still in his sword and helmet like they're going to be attacked here in the heart of Caer Dathyl.

"I won't have you cluttering my sickroom," Eilonwy snaps. "Go guard a wall or something," and the warrior bows and ducks away.

"Of course you insisted," Eilonwy says, talking to Taran again. "First you insist on going, then you insist on coming back. Anyone could have told you that they weren't going to listen to you and you ought to leave it to your war-leader, and I know anyone did tell you, because I did myself, but here you are."

The wound will want a poultice, but that will take her a little time to prepare. Herbs in wine next, if she can get Taran to take anything.

"I'm very cross with you," Eilonwy says quietly, taking Taran's hand. She squeezes, and tries to imagine she can feel him squeezing back.

*

She's holding Taran's head, trying to get him to sip a little wine, when Hywel rushes in.

"Mother," he says. "Mother, they told me about Father. Is it... is it very bad?"

"It may be," Eilonwy says. Hywel looks pale.

"Mother," he says, voice small. "Will I need to hold the kingdom?"

Eilonwy looks at her son, gangly, stork-thin, and just as knobbly. His hands are stained green and there's a splash of something unknown across his face. He's not even as old as Taran was when she first met him.

"Absolutely not," she says.

Hywel goggles at her, and one of the women sets something down somewhere with a loud clunk.

"If your father lives tonight, you may yet be High King," Eilonwy says. "But, Hywel. If we lose him." She beckons him close; the women have turned their backs to give them some privacy, although she's sure they're listening keenly.

"If we lose him, you must yield to King Smoinath, or to one of the hill kings. No one from the West. You must renounce your claim and swear your fealty, do you understand?"

"But I am Father's heir," Hywel says.

"They will kill you," Eilonwy says. "They will kill all of us, if they think they have to. Not Smoinath, but there are enough who will not scruple to do it."

"I understand," Hywel says, lifting his chin. "Of course I'll protect my sisters. And the baby." He looks down at Taran. "Can he hear me?"

"I'm sure he can," Eilonwy lies.

"You don't have to worry, Father," Hywel says. "I'm taking care of Mother just like she says to, so you can use all your strength to get better." He leans in close and whispers. "Was that alright?"

"That was perfect," Eilonwy says, tears in her eyes. "You couldn't have done it better if you had practiced every morning. Now go find your sisters, Hywel bach."

*

Taran stirs a little when she claps the poultice to the wound.

"Dallben," he mutters. "Dallben."

"Dallben you call for," Eilonwy says, keeping the poultice pressed to his leg while he shifts. "Like we haven't been married these twelve years."

Taran doesn't reply.

"You are home with me," Eilonwy says more loudly, leaning down towards his ear. "I'm here, Taran of Caer Dallben."

She forces a smile for her women, who are clustered around and wringing their hands. "You must not be shocked if you hear me call your King an Assistant Pig-Keeper," she says.

"Of course not," one of her favorites says briskly. "We hear you call him that routinely." Eilonwy gives her a real smile.

"Could someone fetch us some supper?" Eilonwy asks. "Bread for me, and broth for the King, if he will take any." She assumes someone else is doing whatever needs to be done tonight in the Great Hall.

A couple of the women flutter off, and Eilonwy dispatches another to make sure the children have been fed. Maybe she should send someone to bring her the baby? But no, if he sees her he'll only want to stay with her, and she wants her full attention for Taran. He's with his sisters, he'll be fine.

"Wmffre won't remember you at all if you leave us now," she says in Taran's ear. "And I'll have to make a betrothal for Carys, and she's much too young to know what sort of man would suit, so you see it's quite impossible at this time."

Taran groans a little.

"I know you would agree if you would just think about it," Eilonwy says, and finally starts binding up the poultice to keep it in place.

*

Her women bring her bread, and cheese, and honey, and apples, which Eilonwy understands all too well. Sometimes the only thing you can do is feed people. She does a lot of that: traveling around, hosting public feasts, sharing the bounty of the Red Fallows, fallow no longer, across the kingdom.

"We really should start calling them the Red Fruitfuls or something," she tells Taran, while she's trying to get some broth into him with a spoon. "The part we're cultivating, at least. What are we up to? Half, do you think?"

"Closer to a third part," one of the women calls out. Eilonwy shoots her a quelling look. Of course she knows that, and of course her women will have any facts at hand, related to the management of the kingdom, that Eilonwy might let slip her mind, but that's hardly the point right now.

"Maybe the Green Fruitfuls," Eilonwy goes on. "The Coll-lands. I don't know if he would love that or hate it."

Taran's eyelids flicker.

Eilonwy makes herself slowly, methodically chew a bite of bread.

*

The hour is late when Eilonwy shoos the last of the women away. She knows one of them will be lurking just on the other side of the door, but she wants to be alone with Taran for awhile, and there isn't much to do at this point. Cool cloths for his brow. Sips of the tisane she's already brewed.

"I thought they would never leave," she tells Taran, when they're finally alone. She sits down on the bed next to him carefully, so she doesn't jostle him, but lets herself sigh a heavy sigh. "Now we can talk about secret things. Like the fact that I have no idea what I'm going to do with myself without you if you leave me."

It's hard to see his color in the firelight, if he's redder, if he's paler. She wishes she still had her bauble-light to see.

"There's the children, of course, and don't think I underestimate the difficulties there. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to head for the Free Commots... there's no point in pulling your hand out of a beehive if you're just going to stand around nearby. You've always said you wanted the children to learn a craft and I can't think of a better place for them to do it."

Eilonwy has always been more inclined to wash the woolens than to weave them, to scour the pots than to make them. She's wondered, occasionally, if Taran wishes she took more of a personal hand in the making of things as well as their organizing.

"Still, you like your salted meat in the winter," she murmurs. "And every bit of food we store or serve, that's a decision someone had to make, and the someone is mostly me and that's work, whether you think so or not."

That's maybe unfair. Taran, she suspects, has never really worried himself over what work she does; for him she's always been more someone who just _is_ , rather than someone who does things.

"Except for things you'd rather I not do," she says, a little tartly, and then kisses his cheek to apologize.

He's too warm. She dabs at his face with a damp cloth.

"The thing is," she says, low and close to him, "The thing is, I never promised anyone I'd build their seawall, or plant their garden. I would have sailed with our friends to the Summer Country. But I stayed for you, Taran. Just for you."

She scoots a little closer to him, there in their bed.

"I've kept busy. And I like to think I've done some good. But, Taran, I think if you had to go and stay here to be King, then you oughtn't be done until you've grown a beard as white as old King Math's, or that's like telling someone half a story, and refusing to finish it! And it's not nice of you, not at all, so you're just going to have to live, Taran King of Prydain!"

A tear splashes down onto Taran's face, and Eilonwy blinks furiously so that more don't follow. He rolls his head a little, and she hurries to dab her tear away.

*

Somewhere in the coldest part of the night, Taran wakes up a little, enough to drink down some tisane. He doesn't open his eyes to look at her, and Eilonwy doesn't think he knows where or when he is, but he drinks, when she holds the cup to his lips and tells him to. She curls up around him, keeping him warm, although he's still too hot to the touch, and she has to roll away, to get up and pace.

The walls feel almost frosty, when she leans her head against them. In another month they'll be sleeping in furs.

Taran had asked her once, after they were wed, if she had minded giving up the Summer Country. Well, she had said practically, she had only spent one night believing they would go there, and the whole rest of her life before that without any thought of it, so she hadn't really given up anything she was attached to, compared with how long she had loved him.

"I had less time with the thought of it than you had with that brooch," she had said. "And I know I told you not to mope about _that_. If I refused to follow my own advice I'd be like a bird that wouldn't sit in its own nest, and that would be a sorry thing to be!"

"Your powers were part of you," Taran had said lowly. "Even if you had given up the use of them. Taliesin called them your wisdom, and told me my path to wisdom was longer and crueler. Eilonwy, I did not ever wish to be cruel to you!"

She had gone about convincing him that he was, in fact, very good to her indeed, and after a little while he had come around to the project of proving just how good to her he could be, and the topic had been abandoned.

But she knows that he keeps her bauble somewhere, even though the light has gone out. She wonders if it would comfort him now to hold it, if he would recognize the shape and heft. She'll have to find out where he keeps it, in case this ever happens again.

Because the thing is, if he does live, if he survives the night... she's going to have to do this again some day. Or he is, for her, or maybe hailstones will fall on them both at once, or something, and then it will be for the children to do, the mourning and the burying. And so it is a little hard, to know that somewhere over the sea there is a Summer Country, but she will never see it. Whenever he rides to battle, there is always the knowledge that, alone among the anxious women, she had had a choice, once.

"You are the wish of my heart," she whispers, and it's a pledge, and a reminder to herself, and a demand.

She listens to the crackle of the fire, and Taran breathing.

Maybe she dozes for a little while, maybe the night takes mercy on her and speeds itself up. All she knows is that the next time she puts her hand to Taran's forehead, it feels cooler, and the shadows of his face look more natural, somehow. She wipes the sweat away from his face, and runs her fingers through his dampened hair.

When she squeezes his hands again, he squeezes back. His eyes flutter open. They focus on her, and he smiles.

"Eilonwy," he says, hoarsely, but she can hear the strength coming back to him, and she puts her head down on his chest and cries in relief.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, man. Eilonwy.
> 
> I didn't know fancy words like "agency" and "integrity" when I read these books when I was nine, and I was too upset about Taran's choice to notice that there was something different about Eilonwy's. I don't think I understood the idea of "unfinished business" at all, when I was nine, but I was able to read over Taran's to-do list and struggle with the idea that any of those things could be better than _eternal happiness_.
> 
> Taran sometimes seems to see Eilonwy about the same way he sees Gurgi - not quite self-responsible, not quite subject to the same bonds of duty and loyalty that he is. Taran makes an agonized choice of mission and purpose over static happiness and Eilonwy decides she can live with that (but not forever) and Taran's next line of dialogue is about Hen Wen. I guess at least he doesn't try to command her to go without him like he does Gurgi. But he seems to think it's entirely reasonable that he would make his choice despite his feelings for her, and then she would make her choice because of her feelings for him. I guess I wanted to see her think about some of that, even if he never did.
> 
> Chronology: she's 30 here if Taran is about 14 to start and Eilonwy is a year younger and the books take about 5 years.
> 
> Misc: Fflur is totally named for Fflewddur Fflam, Smoinath inherited from Smoit, and canon is that Taran lived many happy years and accomplished all his tasks, so he definitely recovers and restores the rest of the Red Fallows and all that.


End file.
